Legit Reviews News History

Next ATI card will have 512MB memory

"ATI is sponsoring a big overclocking tournament this weekend. It is publicly saying that there will be an 'unveiling' of some sort, but no-one knows what it is.

Some of the world's top overclockers, including chaps going by the name of Oppainter, Fugger and Macci are going out there to go and take on the world record 3DMark. Aside from the fact that current ATI hardware will barely scrape the world record, these guys have been told to expect new hardware to fiddle with."

The Inquirer

Posted by | Tue, Feb 22, 2005 - 01:14 PM

Google toolbar move raises online ire

"Google's browser toolbar is raising eyebrows over a feature that inserts new hyperlinks in Web pages, giving the Internet search provider a powerful tool to funnel traffic to destinations of its choice.

When Web surfers install the toolbar in their Microsoft Internet Explorer Web browser and click the AutoLink button, Web pages with street addresses suddenly sprout links to Google's map service by default. Book publishers' ISBN numbers trigger links to Amazon.com, potentially luring shoppers away from competing book sellers such as BarnesandNoble.com. Vehicle ID licenses spawn links to Carfax.com, while package tracking numbers connect automatically to shippers' Web sites."

CNET News

Posted by | Mon, Feb 21, 2005 - 07:47 AM

ULi readies all-in-one AMD K8 solution, first dual-channel DDR2 northbridge

"Taiwan-based chipset vendor ULi plans to begin mass production of a new all-in-one chip solution for AMD K8 processors in the second quarter of this year and aims to begin manufacturing its first product with dual-channel DDR2 memory support at year-end, according to the company?s associate vice president Bruce Tai.

The all-in-one solution, the M1697, will follow another ULi northbridge for the AMD K8 platform, the M1695. Both products are expected to be ready for mass production around May. The M1697 is very interesting because it?s designed to integrate a lot of features, including support for legacy interfaces such as parallel ATA, and new prospective technologies such as SATA II and High-Definition Audio. In addition, the chip has some security functions that support the TPM (Trusted Platform Module) 1.2 specification developed by TCG (Trusted Computing Group)."

DigiTimes Daily IT News

Posted by | Mon, Feb 21, 2005 - 07:44 AM

Corsair "Cool"

I finally got this system set up and running tonight......Look for the review by the end of the week...... so far, very nice little cooling solution.

" If you are pushing the envelope with performance computing such as gaming or rendering photos or animation, your machine can run hot. Way too hot. Don?t trust air cooling to protect you. Put your system on ice ? with COOL by Corsair, our 120mm advanced PC water cooling system. This compact, powerful unit fits largely within your case for a sleeker look and more integrated performance. Unlike any other cooling unit, COOL is based entirely on 3/8" tubing with no converters to restrict flow. The tubing comes factory-clamped to the cooling block and stress tested to ensure leak-free performance." "

Posted by | Mon, Feb 21, 2005 - 03:05 AM

Beginners Guides: 104 Performance Tips for Windows XP

From quick tips to WindowsXP, right through to cool tweak, toys and experiments, PCstats has go you covered with over a hundred new Tech Tips! - Version 1.0.0

PCStats is pleased to present this latest installment of our Windows XP Tips collection. This guide brings you 104 ways to make using Windows XP faster, safer and more enjoyable. Combined with our first two tips articles,101 Tech Tips and 99 Performance Tweaks, PCstats now has over 300 of the best tips for Microsoft Windows XP assembled in one place!

Posted by | Sun, Feb 20, 2005 - 06:23 PM

Nvidia NForce4 SLI motherboards help boost DFI?s January revenues 28%

I haven't finished my testing on the DFI NF4 SLI-DR, but DFI boards seriously rock. This company has really jumped to the top of the motherboard pile in a very short time.

One thing I can say about the NF4 SLI-DR, is if you want to truly realize what AMD's socket 939 is capable of, a great O/C, stability, and the best overall bundle available anywhere, check this board out.

"Better than expected sales of its two recently released Nvidia nForce4 AMD64 motherboards helped push DFI?s January revenues up 28% sequentially to NT$242 million, according to the company.

DFI released the two high-end motherboards ? the LANParty NF4 SLI-DR and LANPartyUT NF4 Ultra-D ? earlier this year and expected to ship 7,000 units in January, boosting its revenues 10% on month. However, stronger than expected demand helped the company ship about 10,000 units last month, and DFI expects shipments of the two motherboards to total 17,000 units in February. About 25% of the shipments were for the SLI-based NF4 SLI-DR motherboard, sources at the company pointed out."

DigiTimes Daily IT News

Posted by | Sat, Feb 19, 2005 - 01:20 PM

Consumers see red over dead pixels

This topic really bothers me. If you throw down anywhere from $400-2000 for an LCD monitor, they should replace it for even ONE dead pixel. Most of the monitors on Newegg.com come with a policy that requires at least eight dead pixels to qualify for replacement

"You've just blown $2,000 on a sexy new flat-panel TV, and it thinks there should be a little black pimple in the middle of Tom Cruise's face.

Good luck getting it fixed. That black spot is a dead pixel, a malfunctioning electronic dot among the millions that make up a typical display. And manufacturers of TV sets, notebook computers, desktop PC displays and other devices equipped with LCD screens vary widely in their policies on rectifying them.

"This is one of the things nobody ever wants to talk about in the industry," said Paul Semenza, an analyst at research company iSuppli. "The reality is that there are a lot of (screens) that aren't quite up to snuff floating around, and they end up somewhere."

CNET News

Posted by | Sat, Feb 19, 2005 - 01:18 PM

Mobile Phone Virus Found in United States

Looks like some cell phone virus made it over to the states finally after seeing them pop up 8 months ago in Asia.  Nokia seems to be the main virus target right now and that makes sense because they are the #1 cell phone maker in the world.  Expect to see more and more phones having anti-virus software  installed or available for purchase.

"The world's first mobile phone virus "in the wild" has spread to the United States from its birthplace in the Philippines eight months ago, a security research firm said on Friday. The virus, called Cabir, has spread slowly into 12 countries and marks the beginning of the mobile phone virus era, which could one day disrupt the lives of many of the world's 1.5 billion mobile phone users. The biggest impact of the relatively innocuous virus, found in about 15 variations so far, is draining mobile phone batteries"

Reuters Technology News

Posted by | Sat, Feb 19, 2005 - 10:07 AM

ATI's Overdrive 4 plans

Good news for ATI owners who want to be able to overclock out of the box with no third party software or using other methods.

" ATI will introduce Overdrive 4 with the next Catalyst Driver scheduled in March.
Previously you could only overclock your GPU core with Overdrive, and only by a rather small amount. Now you can overclock both core and memory and the frequency range will be increased to 75% of the next higher class product. For example the X800 Non-Pro (400 Mhz / 350 Mhz) could be overclocked up to 456 Mhz Core (400 + (475-400) * 0.75). The memory overclock would be 425 Mhz (350 + (450-350) * 0.75). "

TechConnect Magazine

Posted by | Sat, Feb 19, 2005 - 01:27 AM

Huge 'star-quake' rocks Milky Way

Yikes

Astronomers say they have been stunned by the amount of energy released in a star explosion on the far side of our galaxy, 50,000 light-years away.The flash of radiation on 27 December was so powerful that it bounced off the Moon and lit up the Earth's atmosphere. The blast occurred on the surface of an exotic kind of star - a super-magnetic neutron star called SGR 1806-20. If the explosion had been within just 10 light-years, Earth could have suffered a mass extinction, it is said.

BBC Technology News

Posted by | Sat, Feb 19, 2005 - 01:24 AM

Intel Pentium 4 EE 3.74 to arise on Feb 21st

" INTEL IS READY to introduce its next member of its Extreme Expensive family. Intel decided to introduce this CPU on the 20th/21st of February. This new member will feature 2MB of L2 cache.

We already saw 2MB of cache and the 1066MHz front side bus (FSB) with the last 3.46 Pentium 4 Extreme edition CPU but this new faster fellow will provide some new features.

This will be the first Extremely Expensive edition with 64 bit support. This chip will work with Windows 64 bit and as we reported yesterday, you can already get RC 2.0 version from the internet. Intel calls its 64 bit support EM64T, making a rather sarcastic point about AMD's naming schema."

The Inquirer

Posted by | Thu, Feb 17, 2005 - 04:01 PM

Forum Contest & Other Reviews

Legit Reviews Forum Give Away: ASUS P5GD2-Premium Mobo

We are giving away the ASUS P5GD2-Premium i915 chipset motherboard that we reviewed today on the site to a lucky forum member.  We have a small forum so you have pretty good odds of winning!  Head on over to this thread and see how to enter to win this board!

Reviews Around The Web:

 

Posted by | Thu, Feb 17, 2005 - 11:24 AM

25 million in 99 days: Do you all ever sleep?

Looks like Firefox is gaining some market share over the past couple months!

" On February 15th, exactly 99 days after it was released, Firefox 1.0 smashed through the 25 million download milestone. "Thank you." says Blake on spreadfirefox.com "Thank you for helping us take this product from 25 to 25 million, from our little corner of the world to yours, from the technically elite to Karen and Rimone."

"Twenty five million Firefox downloads is a significant achievement, and we see that number continuing to grow," said Mitchell Baker, president of the Mozilla Foundation. "Firefox is being rapidly adopted by the mainstream, with this audience embracing Firefox as a more user-friendly web browsing solution." Firefox downloads have continues at a steady rate since it's launch in November, with well above 200,000 downloads per day. With IE 7 being released as beta in the summer, and Firefox 1.1 planned for June, 2005 is looking to be a pretty good for browser development (lets hope, eh). "

TechConnect Magazine

Posted by | Thu, Feb 17, 2005 - 08:30 AM

AMD dual core gets major Linux World showing

"ONE OF the interesting hardware stories is a series of boxes running as-yet-unannounced dual-core Opteron processors, writes INQ reader Don Altman, from LinuxWorld.

The vendors I saw displaying working systems using these included Cray, HP, Microway, and Sun. Below I'll try to describe a few of the boxes.

HP's contribution was the XW9300 mini-tower running dual Opteron 200-series chips with the ability to run dual-core chips with only a BIOS upgrade.. The motherboard is made by Tyan to an HP design. The box uses 800MHz Hypertransport through the 250 processors and 1GHz for the 252. The as-yet-unannounced dual-core chips were rumoured to be running 1GHz Hypertransport."

The Inquirer

Posted by | Thu, Feb 17, 2005 - 08:20 AM

More snags in Windows XP Service Pack 2

" PC WORLD labs reports it has unearthed two bugs in Windows XP Service Pack 2, one affecting battery life on notebooks, and the other dual layer DVD drives.

According to the report, SP2 has a negative effect on dual layer DVD drives when running Nero software, slowing down InCD4 burning software by as much as 40 per cent. InCD4 software is bundled with many systems.

The same report claims that some Acer notebooks can reduce battery life by as much as an hour."

PCWORLD.com

Posted by | Thu, Feb 17, 2005 - 08:19 AM

Reversal: Next IE update divorced from Windows

"Reversing a longstanding Microsoft policy, Bill Gates said Tuesday that the company will ship an update to its browser separately from the next major version of Windows.

A beta, or test, version of Internet Explorer 7 will debut this summer, Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect said in a keynote address at the RSA Conference 2005 here. The company had said that it would not ship a new IE version before the next major update to Windows, code-named Longhorn, arrives next year."

CNET News

Posted by | Tue, Feb 15, 2005 - 05:08 PM

Motherboard compatibility is the key priority ? An interview with Kingmax VP Lawrence Chang

" Having boosted its capacity by 50% with a new plant in China, Kingmax Semiconductor is hoping to increase its share of the DRAM-module market. But this strategy poses plenty of questions. When can we really expect DDR2 to boom? What does Intel validation mean for a channel-oriented DRAM-module manufacturer? Why does Kingmax market ?color? modules in a number of countries? Recently DigiTimes.com had an opportunity to talk with Lawrence Chang, vice president of sales and marketing at Kingmax, to ask these questions and more. "

DigiTimes Daily IT News

Posted by | Tue, Feb 15, 2005 - 05:06 PM

XGI goes after North American graphics card market

"XGI Technology, a graphics-solution provider, today announced the signing of a distribution agreement with ASI Corporation to promote and sell graphics cards powered by XGI GPUs in the US market. ASI will market and sell XGI?s Volari series cards, including the Volari V8 for the high-end market, V5 for the mainstream market, and the V3XT and V3 for the value market.

The Volari V8 and V5 support Microsoft DirectX9.0b, OpenGL, Shader 2.0, 3D cinematic effects, 8- and 4-pixel pipelines, realistic coloring, and smooth curves with anti-aliasing. For the value market, there are the Volari V3 and V3XT. The Volari V3XT supports DirectX9 and offers HDTV features that are usually only available with higher end products."

DigiTimes Daily IT News

Posted by | Tue, Feb 15, 2005 - 05:04 PM

S-ATA to USB bridge chip released

" OXFORD SEMI said it has released a bridge chip which will speed up the ability to create external hard drives and optical drives for the Macintosh and the PC.

The chip, the OXU921S, is a 128 pin device with an integrated S-ATA phy, a USB 2.0 phy, and an ARM7 TDMI microprocessor.

The firmware, said Oxford Semi, allows compatibility with standard operating system drivers.

The USB 2.0 link and phy support fill and high speed modes as well as backward compatibilit with USB1.1. The chip includes a 6K cache for USB data, and that means a data transmission speed of up to 480Mbit/secs, the firm said. The S-ATA core operates at 1.5GHz, giving a disk interface data rate of 150Mbytes/sec."

The Inquirer

Posted by | Tue, Feb 15, 2005 - 05:01 PM

AMD cuts chip prices

You can read my little rant regarding this article and the price gouging being practiced by Newegg and others in our fourms

Forum

" Advanced Micro Devices adjusted the prices on a number of its PC and server processors on Monday.

The chipmaker, in a regularly scheduled price adjustment, followed the introduction of higher-performance Opteron server chips with cuts of up to 35 percent on existing Opterons. AMD also lowered the prices of its Athlon 64 chips for desktop and notebook PCs by as much as 34 percent and cut its Sempron value chips by between 6 percent and 19 percent. But in a twist, it also slightly raised the prices on a handful of processors, including a pair of Athlon MP server chips and a Sempron for desktop PCs.

Most of AMD's Opteron price moves resulted in cuts of 18 percent or more. The chipmaker lowered prices on Opteron 800 processors, chips it designed to fit into servers with four or more processors, by up to 25 percent. The Opteron 848, for example, went down 25 percent from $1,165 to $873."

CNET News

Posted by | Tue, Feb 15, 2005 - 04:58 PM

71.81 WHQL Drivers are "out" on the web

If you are running some of the recent Geforce 6 series cards or even the Quadro gfx card you might be interested in the 71.81 WHQL drivers that have found on the web.  Enthusiasts are seeing a 8-12% gain on 3dmark2005 and some issues have been fixed on Halo.

Since these are "leaked" we suggest that you use and abuse at your own risk!

"These drivers are date stamped at the 28th of January 2005 making them the absolute newest set to date. Furthermore these drivers WHQL (Microsoft tested) signed. We recrunched the driver set towards a lovely 15MB. It includes the easy to use setup.exe for easy installation."

Legit Forums

Posted by | Tue, Feb 15, 2005 - 10:41 AM

Circuit City mulls $3.25 billion takeover offer

I knew that Walmart was hurting stores like Circuit City, but I didn't know they were this bad!  The #2 Consumer Electronic Store in America could soon be owned by a new company if this deal is accepted and approved.

"Circuit City Stores, the No. 2 U.S. consumer electronics chain, on Tuesday said it had received an unsolicited takeover offer of $17 a share, or about $3.25 billion. The proposal from Highfields Capital Management represents a 19.5 percent premium over Circuit City's closing share price Monday of $14.23 on the New York Stock Exchange. Its announcement sent Circuit City shares soaring 19.5 percent to $17 on the Inet electronic brokerage system before the bell."

CNET News

Posted by | Tue, Feb 15, 2005 - 07:32 AM

DVD copy protection strengthened

Looks like DVD's are going to be tougher to copy, but good news is still to be had!  It turns out that the new anti-piracy measures still can't evade all the current ripping programs!

"DVDs will be harder to copy thanks to new anti-piracy measures devised by copy protection firm Macrovision.The pirated DVD market is enormous because current copy protection was hacked more than five years ago. Macrovision says its new RipGuard technology will thwart most, but not all, of the current DVD ripping (copying) programs used to pirate DVDs."

BBC Technology News

Posted by | Tue, Feb 15, 2005 - 07:28 AM

Girl gamers who shoot first, love later

If you didn't have a loved one to share the night with last night (Valentine's Day) then gaming might be the way to a new love according to this article.  Who woulda thought you could hook up with women through an online game!

"Falling in love with someone you meet online through a chatroom or dating service is so old hat. Falling in love with someone you meet online while annihilating them with a lightning gun seems much more fun.

And it is happening regularly, as more women gamers set up their own clans and become serious gamers."

BBC Technology News

Posted by | Mon, Feb 14, 2005 - 11:33 PM

CPU-Z 1.27 Released

Grab the latest version of CPU-Z if you haven't already! Recently version 1.27 was launched and is worth the update if you need it. This update supports Pentium 4 6xx processors and has a new validation system built in.

"CPU-Z is a diagnostic tool that provides information on your CPU, including: processor name and vendor, core stepping and process, processor package, internal and external clocks, clock multiplier, partial overclock detection, processor features, supported instructions sets, L1 and L2 cache information, location, size, speed, and technology."

Posted by | Mon, Feb 14, 2005 - 05:43 PM

AMD Introduces Opteron 852 and 252

SUNNYVALE, CALIF.-Feb. 14, 2005-AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced the latest additions to the award-winning AMD Opteron(tm) processor family - Models 852 and 252. The new models represent the worlds highest performing processors for one-way to eight-way x86 servers and workstations.

To enable OEMs and system builders to take advantage of the next generation of I/O technology, AMD also announced the AMD-8132(tm) HyperTransport(tm) PCI-X(r) 2.0 tunnel, scheduled to ship for servers and workstations this month. The latest addition to the AMD-8000(tm) series of chipsets, the AMD-8132 tunnel brings high-performance PCI-X 2.0 connectivity to AMD Opteron processor-based systems with increased throughput, improved RAS capabilities, robust data management and enhanced HyperTransport technology connectivity."

TechConnect Magazine

Posted by | Mon, Feb 14, 2005 - 05:37 PM

7.22GHz Intel Pentium 4 -- Overclocking Done Right!

Looks like Fugger got his Intel 3.8GHz Socket T processor up to 7.22GHz and able to enter the BIOS and all.  Pretty darn nifty, but how come his CPU is running -122 degrees! Well worth a look if you like overclocking and are a fan of Intel cpu's. Some pictures of the overclock can be seen here!  Pretty amazing if you ask us. 

 

Posted by | Mon, Feb 14, 2005 - 09:13 AM

Math Is Done: Napster To Go Doesn't Add Up

This article done by the Washington Post and published on Yahoo News puts a new twist on how to look at the Napster Music Service. It turns out that the Napster To Go's $15 monthly bills, will keep coming due for as long as you care to listen to your downloads.  Even if you don't plan on downloading more songs you will have to continue to pay the $15 a month for the songs you already downloaded.  This won't matter if you plan to pay the $15 a month anyway, but paints a big dark cloud for those who want to pay $15 to fill their PC and then no longer pay monthly.

"Whether you like Napster To Go, the online store's new music subscription service, depends on whether you think of it as all-you-can-eat or all-you-can-pay. Both descriptions are accurate. For $15 a month, Napster To Go offers unlimited song downloads -- in a copy-restricted format that can be played only on Windows XP computers and some digital music players -- but these songs expire if you don't keep paying that fee each month."

If that isn't bad enough check this out:

"Because this underlying software is so new, Napster To Go is the least compatible music store in existence. You can use it only on a Windows XP computer running Windows Media Player 10, and you can transfer your downloads only to a Windows Media-compatible player that includes special software and circuitry to enforce the pay-to-play deal."

Yahoo

Posted by | Sun, Feb 13, 2005 - 12:17 PM

Profits drop at PC giant Dell

Dell stocks too a small hit just before the weekend, but it looks like they knew it was coming and was a trade off for tax breaks next year.

"Computer industry bellwether Dell has reported an 11% drop in quarterly profit because of a one-off tax charge. Net income in the three months to 28 January was $667m (Ł357m) from $749m a year earlier. Sales were up 17% at $13.46bn - just below market targets. Dell paid $280m in taxes during the quarter so it would now qualify for a lower tax rate on overseas profits."

BBC Technology News

Posted by | Sun, Feb 13, 2005 - 12:08 PM

Only "good" Pentium 4s have EM64T enabled

" ONLY THE CYNICAL survive. Long after they are supposed to, probably. Intel has told everyone on the record now that it will soon switch all of its desktop processors over to support for 64-32 extensions - or iAMD64 as we dub it.

How will it do this? Well, the engineers at a fab will throw a switch and the number of the processors will change so that a 531 - a 3GHz Pentium 4 - will be exactly identical to a 530 except EM64T will be switched on."

The Inquirer

Posted by | Sun, Feb 13, 2005 - 10:31 AM

AMD FX57 coming soon?

" OVER here you will find a guide to the Athlon 64 guide, probably one of the most complete. Mentionned over therer is the forthcoming but still unannounced FX 57. A very complete handbook which can be translated using Google. "

The Inquirer

Posted by | Sat, Feb 12, 2005 - 07:41 PM

Macromedia and Nokia to bring Flash to phones

Get ready to start seeing compelling Flash content for mobile devices from here on out!

"Macromedia and Nokia announced an agreement to integrate Macromedia Flash technology into Nokia's Series 60 Platform for mobile devices, including smart phones. The partnership hopes to foster development work to create Flash content and applications for mobile phones. There are about 1.8 million registered develop-ers in Forum Nokia and more than one million Macromedia Flash developers.

"We look forward to bringing together the significant developer communities of both companies to deliver a new generation of digital experiences to an even broader section of the mobile ecosystem," Al Ramadan, executive vice president and general manager, mobile and devices, Macromedia, said in a statement.

"

Infosweb

Posted by | Sat, Feb 12, 2005 - 08:26 AM

Samsung TCCD IC's -- Still Making News!

Seems like The INQ published an update to their Samsung TCCD article and try to claim our information is all wrong.  The only thing our article states is that there is nothing to freak out about. The Samsung TCCD supply is going to last months even if they stopped 100% of their production today.  The whole moral of our article is that you don't have to rush out and buy new memory modules today!

In their update they actually confirm our article by including that Corsair has a six month agreement to get stock.  Heck, thats all we were getting at! They started a memory buying frenzy yesterday! Oh well, in the end I'm sure Wil Harris and I will share yet another beer the next time we meet again in person.

If you'd like to know where our information comes from take a look at the forum link below and see pictures taken of our "wrong" sources.  Sure our quotes were made on the record, but they were not lies!  Besides news stories like this are what we strive for.  Once again Legit Reviews was "Straight Up and on the Money!

"One thing that is clear is that Corsair still has stock. The Fremont guys have just signed a six month agreement to get hold of the chips from Samsung, and we suspect that it will be the only company able to get any. The channel is already emptied of TCCDs, there are no places for anybody who isn't Corsair to buy them. This is good news for Corsair, which, we think, are going to have the monopoly on the parts."

Legit Forums

Posted by | Fri, Feb 11, 2005 - 08:33 AM

Winbond and ProMOS pursue capacity expansion amid industry downturn

It should be interesting to see what IC's these two companies will be producing in the future.  Hopefully something good for enthusiasts!  IC's like the BH-5's or TCCD's wouldn't hurt on the DDR2 side of things!

"Despite most observers forecasting an industry downturn in 2005, both Winbond Electronics and ProMOS Technologies recently secured bank loans for funding construction of their respective 12-inch fabs, and both companies reaffirmed confidence in their capacity expansion plans."

DigiTimes Daily IT News

Posted by | Fri, Feb 11, 2005 - 08:18 AM

ULi to unveil PCIe-enabled northbridge with K8 support in February

"ULi Electronics plans to unveil its first PCIe-enabled northbridge chip, the M1695, for the Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) K8 platform by the end of this month, according to company sources. The new chip joins ULi?s M1573 southbridge to provide a complete PCIe-enabled chipset.

The M1695, which is comparable to the SiS756 chipset from Silicon Integrated Systems (SiS) and the K8T890 chipset from VIA Technologies, will have a graphics interface that supports both PCIe and AGP8x standards, the sources said.

The M1695 will also feature two 8x PCIe lanes, enabling functionality similar to that of a scalable link interface (SLI), the sources added."

DigiTimes Daily IT News

Posted by | Fri, Feb 11, 2005 - 01:39 AM

Intel standard cooler not really good enough

" IT'S BEEN A a little while since we first saw Intel's 775 Pentium 4 stock cooler. As you know, as soon as Intel launched the LGA775 socket, cooling manufacturers had to come up with some new ideas.

The final shipping cooler is mounted on four holes in the motherboard, and the cooler works using a push and turn mechanism. It looks easy, but sometimes it's not."

The Inquirer

Posted by | Fri, Feb 11, 2005 - 01:35 AM

2MB L2 caches in store for Opteron?

" THE GUYS over at Siliconinvestor.com have an eye for anything AMDish, particularly so because they track stock like we run out of stockings.

And so to this German page at the forums of Deluxxpc.de, here, which lists all sorts of Athlerons on the way, with different sockets, cache sizes, wattage and the like.

Yes, an Opteron with 2MB of level two cache would surely be an interesting thing. Wonder how fast AMD's swapping out the 130 nanometre AMD64 chips for the 90 nanometre ones. Must ask AMD that question."

The Inquirer

Posted by | Fri, Feb 11, 2005 - 01:33 AM

Abit USA announces 2004 results

Abit Computer Corporation (USA), a manufacturer of PC motherboards and graphics cards, has announced strong sales growth in the US market in 2004.  Things are really looking up lately for ABIT.  The stock price was nearing just one dollar even per share and has already bounced back to $2.84 a share today on the stock market.

"2004 was a banner year for Abit, with total sales in the US growing by nearly 52%. With its platform segmentation evenly split 50-50 between Intel and AMD, Abit?s performance, mainstream, and value segments accounted for 19%, 60%, and 21%, respectively. Abit?s performance boards, such as the AA8 and AV8 Series, are doing exceptionally well among its core audience of PC enthusiasts. In particular, the new Fatal1ty AA8XE is experiencing high demand, having been named, by PC Perspective, as the best Intel gaming motherboard available on the market."

DigiTimes Daily IT News

Posted by | Thu, Feb 10, 2005 - 04:49 PM

Getting to grips with Sony's PSP

The Sony PSP is catching some news headlines today.  I didn't know that it would have an 8 person multi-player mode that operates via wi-fi!  Looks more and more interesting every time I look at it!

"In just over four years since the PS2 was launched, the technology that went in to that version of the console now almost fits into the smaller PSP. Perhaps, instead of being known as the PSP, the handheld should more accurately be called PlayStation 1.75.

What is different in this version is the multi-player mode that lets up to eight players take each other on via wi-fi. Sony is also intending to make extras and add-ons for the game that can be loaded via a PC or memory stick."

BBC Technology News

Posted by | Thu, Feb 10, 2005 - 04:45 PM

Happy Chinese New Year!

Here's a shout out to our Chinese friends in wishing them all a very Happy New Year! Today marks the year of the Rooster! For information on the Chinese New Year, check out some of these links off Google's News search engine!

Posted by | Wed, Feb 09, 2005 - 06:30 PM

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